Beaver Creek

Is Beaver Creek for real? Free parking, quaint Bavarian village, escalators that make the typically chaotic, booted schlep to the chairlifts nearly effortless. A ski valet at your hotel who, after helping you into your heated boots, carries your skis to the chair. Swift, well-placed lifts that, in a brisk 15 minutes, deposit your mixed-ability brood at the summit, where you're comfortable sending the kids off to explore Powell, Mystic Maze and Jack Rabbit Alley while you fry your quads on Golden Eagle, the country’s only FIS downhill course. Or the single lift ride required to rendezvous for lunch, followed by an afternoon lapping the all-levels-friendly Strawberry Park and Upper Beaver Creek lifts. It’s real. All of it. Right down to the warm chocolate-chip cookies at day’s end. The price tag? Unfortunately, that’s real as well. —D.W.

What’s New » The Rose Bowl triple was replaced with a high-speed quad that cuts the 10-minute ride in half, spelling quicker access to Stone Creek Chutes.

On-Hill Lunch » Settle into an outdoor table at Red Tail Camp for barbecue and live music during Deck Days, every Sunday from late February to early April.

As the world’s best skiers slide through gates, warming up for the first round of the men’s slalom at the FIS Alpine World Championships on an ice-slick course in Beaver Creek, Colorado, a broad-chested, auburn wiener dog stands front and center in the Red Tail Stadium grandstands on an event producer's desk.

Named Franklin, he wears a rainbow lei and soaks in what sun ekes through cloud cover from his perch.

The F.I.S. Alpine World Ski Championships are coming to Beaver Creek, Colorado, for the first time since 1999. Time to break out the cowbells. America, at long last, is a ski-racing nation.

The last time Lindsey Vonn got a shot at downhill racing immortality, a painful crash left her icing her knee in Colorado while the world’s fastest scorched the slopes at the Sochi Games. At Krasnaya Polyana, her Olympic downhill crown got split in two by Slovenia’s Tina Maze and Switzerland’s Dominique Gisin, who tied for the 2014 gold.

Who knew a quarter-inch-long beetle could cause so much destruction? The nefarious mountain pine beetle, responsible for infesting roughly 3.4 million acres of lodgepole pines in the Colorado Rockies, has left behind diseased mountainsides nationwide that would collectively cover the state of Connecticut.